A New Fairness Index and Novel Approach for QoS-Aware Resource Allocation in LTE Networks Based on Utility Functions

Resource allocation techniques have recently appeared as a widely recognized feature in LTE networks. Most of existing approaches in resource allocation focus on maximizing network’s utility functions. The great potential of utility function in improving resource allocation and enhancing fairness and mean opinion score (MOS) indexes has attracted large efforts over the last few years. In this paper, a new fairness index is proposed to measure resource allocation performance for real-time/delay-tolerant applications. This index can suggest a new approach for resource allocation. There are several methods in resource allocation of cellular networks which employ fairness index for performance evaluation. Here, we focus on utility-function-based resources allocation and related algorithms. According to the suggested method, the base station (BS) allocates resources based on different services requirements. Appropriate utility function for each application is defined, and the requested quality-of-services (QoS) are satisfied through solving the corresponding optimization problem. The new well-defined fairness index shows that the proposed method has a good performance for different real-time/delay-tolerant applications. Additionally, numerical results show that this approach is able to improve other important indicators such as throughput and MOS as well.